In Königsberg at the end of the eighteenth century, “person” was the basic moral unit anchoring Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative – the name for those creatures whose “rationality” and insuperable “dignity” “already marks them out as an end in itself.” In classical Greece, “person” referred to the “face,” which in Roman theater became a mask worn by an actor, and later the actor himself. In Philadelphia in 1787, at the US Constitutional Convention, “person” was the unit of measure that determined the apportionment of political representation to the states, based on a formula that counted “the whole Number of free Persons”; “all other persons” to be tallied at the discounted rate of five for three. In 1719, on an island in the Orinoco effluence, “person” referred to Poll, Robinson Crusoe’s domesticated parrot, who “was the only Person permitted to talk” to the shipwrecked sailor. In England, during the era of high imperialism, “person” was the legal fiction that gave life to the business corporation (the colonial charter company) and granted immortality to certain rights that would ordinarily “die with the [natural] person.” In 1947, “person” was the “continental” concept internationalized in the draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that, according to Eleanor Roosevelt, started a “storm” among State Department lawyers who insisted that it was a legal figure alien to US law; the storm abated in embarrassment when it was discovered that there was indeed a precedent for “person” in US law, when Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney opined for the majority in the Dred Scott decision in 1857 that “a slave has no juridical personality” and therefore no right to recognition anywhere as a person before the law.